Brodhead Pietenpol Association

Original Posted By: "Greg Yotz"
Don, That was a very good posting about the wing placement on the Piet. It has always bothered me about angling the cabane struts to move the wing around a lot. I like the idea of lift forces being transferred from the wing thru straight cabanes struts into the fuselage, it seems to me that there are less side forces on the cabanes and you'll get full advantage of their strength. Saying that, I fully expect to use the ability to move the wing to fine tune my wing placement. Heck, I'm still an amateur builder, and I expect to make some errors, but I hope that the struts will be more or less vertical. I also don't think I've heard of any Piets going down due to structural failure in this area, so I don't know that it's a big safety issue, angle or not. I also have the feeling that this is one of those quirky Piet things where it's okay NOT to conform to traditional design standards! I've kinda wondered for awhile that the statement about the Piet not coming out of a slip is more a problem with the one-piece wing being straight with no positive dihedral combined with the smallish vertical tail-surface area. I plan to build the 3 piece wing with a little positive dihedral to insure stability and it looks a little better. I had thought about slightly enlarging the vertical tail surfaces, but I figure there are a lot of Piets out there with the smaller one, plus, it would add more weight to the tail which for me is a no-no, So I built the traditional size vertical stab/rudder. Don, I'm sure your posting will generate a good bit of spirited discussion on the list here, and that's a good thing, stuff like this gets the rest of us off our duff, and excited again, (along with Stevee's morning-flight posting - nice one Steve, wish I could have been there. Gordon Baxter would have been proud...). I think I'll go out this weekend and work on my horizontal stab/elevators some!Thanks!Gary Meadows________________________________________________________________________________

Original Posted By: DonanClara(at)aol.com
Gary, I plan on making my struts adjustable with a threaded tie rod end justso I can play around with dihedral. I think this should add to thestability and recover from a slip. I had the same problem on a KoldFirestar I built. After I added dihedral the plane would fly true and leveland recover from slips with hands off controls. Before I had to fight itback to level flight. I always thought on the Firestar that it waspartially due to having no sides to the fuselage adding to the verticalstab. It seemed that wing dihedral made plenty of difference. I originallywas putting it in for better hands free flying so I could take pictures.I'm going to try to add as little dihedral as possible.I hope my cabane struts won't have to much slope to them, their not beingvertical worried me too. I talked to a friend who is a aero engineer and hesaid that they are so over sized it won't make a bit of difference. He saidthat he would be more worried about the attach points because they aredesigned in tention and not so much in cross loads. He is supposed to beback for the fourth of July and take a look at mine.GregGary wrote:> I've kinda wondered for awhile that the statement about the Piet not>coming out of a slip is more a problem with the one-piece wing being>straight with no positive dihedral combined with the smallish vertical>tail-surface area. I plan to build the 3 piece wing with a little positive>dihedral to insure stability and it looks a little better.________________________________________________________________________________